Letters to Loved Ones EP

The Gift

‘Ah, it’s wonderful to have the gift’. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this I could buy myself a rather nice gift. It implies that it’s all just the luck of the draw; some of us got it for free and, for the rest, there’s no point in even trying. And it’s that last part that makes the idea a little dangerous, in my view. It astonishes me how often students who are struggling with a tricky passage of, say, Bach, will exclaim upon hearing me demonstrate it ‘you see, some people just have it’……I’ve been playing for 30 years, might that have something to do with it perhaps? I think it’s a get-out for some students; much easier to focus on this nebulous idea of ‘the gift’ than consider, for example, how much practise they’re doing! Not making much progress? Not your fault, you don’t have the gift, right?!

The other side of this is that we do place a very high premium on things being ‘natural’, regardless of the end result – consider the difference in attitudes towards natural and bottle blondes, for example. And it’s certainly not unusual to hear musicians boasting of being a ‘natural’, as if that really makes any difference to their present level of musicianship. Personally, whenever I have the privilege of playing with a first-rate musician, I don’t waste any time wondering whether they came by their musicianship ‘naturally’, through hard work, or through prayer and fasting; I’m only interested in whether they can do it. I’ve been described as a ‘natural’ myself, chiefly because I come from a family of professional musicians – and indeed it does come naturally to me, now. Now that I’ve grown up in an environment where it was nurtured and supported, and now that I’ve put in my 10,000 hours. It’s rather like saying your accent is natural – it’s natural now, but you weren’t born with it. The only part of whatever I have that I consider a ‘gift’ is the urge to keep doing it, to persevere in the face of failure. A perseverance that has resulted in a decent level of musicianship.